


singular

by 2x2verse (agent_florida)



Series: NSFW Stridercest Week 2017 [7]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Lazy Mornings, M/M, Morning Cuddles, Morning Sex, Navel-Gazing, Sleepy Cuddles, Sleepy Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 04:06:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20251891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agent_florida/pseuds/2x2verse
Summary: You are nine years old and could functionally live forever. Dirk is a little more than 22, and someday, he’ll die.----Cleanup for Stridercest Week 2017 (believe it or not).





	singular

**Author's Note:**

> yes, this draft has been sitting in my folder for more than two years. no, i don't know why that title.

Well, this is what you get for taking care of Dirk. He’d stayed up for 36 hours straight, which you know isn’t a good thing for organic-types, so you’d insisted that he go to bed—and he dragged you with him. You. The robot who doesn’t need to sleep. Sure, you could go into sleep mode, or just shut off entirely to freak him out and make him boot you into recovery in the morning, but there are so many other things you could do with this time that don’t involve any physical movement on your part. Binge something on Hulu, hit the random button on Wikipedia until you’re out of dead celebrities, read some scholarly articles you’ve been putting off for a while…

Okay, you can admit it. You’re bored out of your mind.

That’s one thing about Dirk that you love, though: he never lets you stay bored for long. Even now, practicing for death with his shower-soft hair streaking across the pillow, he’s simply fascinating to you. It doesn’t hurt that he threw off his towel before he crawled under his sheets and insisted you shed your bodysuit when you joined him. Just the simple contact of his skin against yours has your processors humming contentedly.

The problem with Dirk being dead to the world, though, is that it gives you time to _think_. Deep down, you’re really nothing but an elaborate mechanism for an electronic brain, one that was already prone to navel-gazing before it was uploaded into a computer almost nine years ago. You’re afraid to touch Dirk lest you wake him, but all you want to do is run a hand through his hair and idly pet at him as you brood.

There are so many functions you learned as a server-side entity, and you never quite let go of them when you got transferred. For instance, there’s a linkback to the atomic clock in your programming that keeps ticking down the time, whether you want it to or not. It’s nearing midnight now, and the dim pollution of Houston city lights is filtering through the window shades. Another feature, one that you abuse all the time, is your Wi-Fi capabilities. To take advantage of it while you’re just laying here doing literally nothing, you queue up a huge torrent, just to see how long it’ll take.

Dirk looks so tired. His eyes are gently closed, and the longer he rests, the less purple shades his eye sockets. With his breathing so deep and even, it gives you an almost meditative pulse to follow with your fans, your coolant system. And that means you just sink further into your head—because, even though you’re breathing alongside him, you’re not really _breathing_, are you? You could breathe, before, and while this mimics that function, you don’t need to do it. There’s nothing that could compromise your airway the way Dirk could get choked just by swallowing the wrong way or barely irritating his larynx. You might overheat if you don’t, but if you’re just staying still, not using too much of your processing power, that’s less of a risk. You lay down properly, head on the pillow next to Dirk’s so you can search his face for any possible sign of discomfort in his sleep, and power down your fans.

Your coolant system is made to take up the brunt of the work in keeping your body at a manageable temperature. Technically, you’re supposed to run hotter than human, but you’ve learned that your elevated body heat makes Dirk uncomfortable—and makes old lizard parts of your brain think you’re running a fever. Fans and coolant together mean you can run at a chill ninety-eight-point-six. The tubing that circulates the coolant through your system is meant to simulate blood vessels, but there’s no give-and-take of oxygen, no clear consequences if your mechanical heart skips a metaphorical beat. You don’t even have a noticeable pulse at your neck, your wrist, not the way Dirk’s blood jumps under his skin even now. Can you trace his now without waking him? Tenderly, gradually, you introduce your fingers to the delicate span of his throat, finding his heartbeat with your thumb and fitting your other fingers into the groove where his head meets his spine. Dirk’s so far into REM sleep that his only response is a slight snuffle of air out his nostrils.

11:59 P.M. You understand why Dirk always wants to stay awake as long as he can, even to the detriment of his own health, the consequence of his cognitive decline. Sleeping is a waste of time, to him, even though it’s simultaneously a biological necessity. There’s so much he wants to do, only so much of a life he gets to do it in, that he wants to make every moment into something that pushes him forward, someway, somehow. You just want him to take better care of himself—you’re not quite sure how to do it for him, and he’d push back against you anyhow, or even find some way to loop you into it.

Midnight. Your internal calendar reminds you of a recurring event.

It’s your birthday.

One of your birthdays, anyhow. You still share Dirk’s meteordate, about a month and a half ago, because you shared his consciousness for more than thirteen years, and then there’s the anniversary of the day you were moved into this chassis, but this—today makes nine years since the creation of _you_. As an entity. As a _person_.

You are nine years old and could functionally live forever. Dirk is a little more than 22, and someday, he’ll die.

Not any day soon, you hope. Of course, the way he throws himself recklessly against any challenge that comes his way, one of these days he’ll run out of chances, and he tends to roll a natural 1 on every single self-preservation check, but he’s still young, by human standards. Still in the first quarter of his life. His brain hasn’t even stopped growing yet, he can’t, he _won’t_—

The steady metronome of Dirk’s pulse, his breathing, centers you again. Look at you, fussing about things like _mortality_ when you’ll never even experience it. Or—if Dirk—if there wasn’t anyone to help you with your maintenance—which is nonsense, isn’t it. You can perform all your maintenance yourself, even if the angles get a bit awkward, and what you can’t do, you could build a scrapbot to help you with, just like Dirk had Sawtooth and Squarewave long before he made you. You just… you’re not sure you’d _want_ to.

If you let yourself rust, what would go first? Your skin would perforate, probably. You look down at your hand, the one that got scraped so badly when you won that first strife against Dirk. No sign of any of that damage now, of course. Not like the scar that horizontally bifurcates Dirk’s throat, physical evidence of mistakes and bad decisions and memories. You thumb at it where it crosses his adam’s apple, but that makes Dirk shift under the sheets. His knees end up meeting your thighs; he’s comfortably sharing your space.

You’re no longer comfortable touching him, though. Not with your artificial skin. After your skin tore away, what would be next? Exposed wiring would oxidize, probably. The most crucial is around your joints. Your limbs would likely fall off, but maybe just one digit at a time instead of giving you the dignity of your whole arm or leg going at once. The fingers that were on Dirk’s skin would be so much trash on the ground—there would be nothing left worth touching, at that point, anyhow. You wouldn’t be missing much.

How long until your organs started failing? Your coolant would probably be leaking at that point, but not at a rate where your systems couldn’t synthesize more to replace what was missing. But it’s not as though you need to eat for sustenance, and some parts of your pelvis would be entirely superfluous by that point. Again, you’d probably go in stages, losing your sacral region, then your lumbar, all the way up until you’d be only a head left at that point. Nothing to circulate coolant, no fans to regulate temperature. Everything in your head is protected from critical failures like that, though: insulated cabling, self-venting, better-quality wiring not as susceptible to melting points or oxidization.

The stomach you don’t have clenches at the thought that you would exist like that for the rest of forever—just a brain in a fluidless vat, nothing but thinking and memory. You wouldn’t even have a way to end that existence, and with modern ethics being the way it is, even if you asked for help, no one would give it to you.

Your torrent is at forty-five percent and Dirk’s been soundly unconscious for four hours by now. Have you seriously spent until three in the fucking morning ruminating over this goddamn bullshit? You should never be allowed to lie down by yourself with nothing else better to do. When you move out of the divot you’ve made in the mattress, Dirk doesn’t make any moves to follow you. In fact, he’s drooling into the pillow by now. You hope he continues to sleep well without your presence next to him. For now, you feel like you don’t deserve to be here. If you get away from being horizontal, maybe you can get this dirty coolant out of your head and recirculating into something cleaner, wash out your skull until you can forget you were ever on this train of thought.

You don’t make it far. It was your idea to put Dirk to bed, after all, so you need to make sure he stays there. But you can see him from the bathroom, if you get his reflection just right in the mirror. And to keep your angle _just right_, you climb up to the bathroom counter and hug your knees to your chest, turning on your night vision to see a little clearer.

Which just means you can see yourself flawlessly in the reflection.

… Well, fuck.

There really isn’t anything about you that could be categorized as ‘natural,’ is there. Even just sitting here, you’re far too still to be an actual flesh-and-blood human being. No rise and fall of shoulders as you breathe, no organic sway of your body with your heartbeat. Your eyes are set to deeply in your face, and they gleam not with wet but with radioactive green. The only hair follicles you have are on your scalp and for your brows; the rest of you is completely bare. What hair you do have is stiff and permanently styled into Dirk’s preferred spikes. While it’s nice to be so impeccably groomed at all times, there’s no way to make it do anything else unless you get a literal scalp transplant, and even then, the fibers of your synthetic hair probably wouldn’t want to play nice. Your face is just on that edge of too symmetric where it lands straight into the uncanny valley of the dolls.

You’re taking up too little space on the counter. Humans can’t fold themselves into the shapes you can. If you were organic, the hyperextension capabilities of your joints would be a legitimate syndrome, but it must be amusing for Dirk to be able to make you literally bend backwards for him. Of course, it helps that nothing on you is extraneous. Every ‘muscle’ you have is deeply woven cords meant to facilitate limb movement; your body type is, literally, ‘wiry.’ Where humans would have calluses on their skin from frequent use, your hands and feet are as silicone-soft as the day you were transferred. And, of course, just in case you could ever pass for a real boy, there’s the smooth non-gendered span of your crotch to set people straight—or, rather, to send them away, heterosexual or otherwise.

A shuffling noise from the bedroom brings you back from cataloguing everything that could ever have been wrong about you. Dirk’s out of bed, moving for the bathroom. If he didn’t notice you weren’t next to him, he’s sure as hell going to notice you in here. You’re caught no matter what; no sense in moving. He doesn’t turn the light on, just shoves the door full open with a sleep-clumsy hand, finds the rug with his toes, and takes a leak. When he goes to wash his hands, he has to elbow your feet out of the sink. “Hal,” he mumbles, all gravelly in his throat and almost lost under the rush of water. “C’me back t’ bed.”

“Are you going back to sleep?”

Dirk nods as he fumbles at the hand towel. “You promised.”

“I did.” He’s probably still got a few hours in him, but you have a torrent you’re trying to keep an eye on, and you may as well do something menial while you keep an eye on him. When he pulls you off the counter, the hand at your wrist is cold from the tap water.

The blankets are still warm from where Dirk was resting, and he fits neatly back into the pile; your side of his bed isn’t near as comfortable as it was when you left it. Before you can really settle in flat on your back, though, Dirk paws at you, drags you closer, slings a knee over your thigh. “Turn y’r fans back on.”

“I don’t need to.” Correction: you _didn’t_ need to, when he wasn’t in your personal space.

“Mmh. Nice white noise,” he explains, and leaves his arm strapped over your chest, his face on your shoulder.

No. Like hell are you going to be Dirk Strider’s dakimakura. If there must be cuddling, then by god, you’re determined to be an active participant. You roll onto your side, so your knees get tangled in Dirk’s legs; your free hand goes to his lower back, but his head stays where it was, pinning your arm as his pillow. At least your limbs won’t ‘fall asleep’ on you if he does this—your coolant flow is still at functioning levels, and there’s nothing about this kind of discomfort that would give you a pins-and-needles sensation. It’s not a position you want to hold for long, but if it will help him sleep, it’s the least you can do. “Better?”

“Muh,” is what you think was supposed to be ‘much,’ but got muddled as Dirk started nodding off again.

This is… not a thing the two of you do very often. Dirk keeps strange hours, you don’t have the patience to just be physically present when you could be doing anything else, and generally when you’re in his bed it’s for decidedly other purposes. This, though, this casual intimacy—that he wants to be this close to you—that he trusts you with his vulnerability—that he’s finally sleeping, taking care of himself like you need him to—that both of you are without any defenses—you could learn to love this. Your fans flare in your chest and Dirk, unconscious, moves his hand to your sternum to cover the sound of the struggle.

It’s that godawful hour in the morning when not even gods are awake. Outside the windows is a gathering gray that threatens dawn but isn’t anywhere close. Internet traffic is so low that you’re going to get slower speeds out of streaming. If you walked out on the street right now, you’d swear you could find a Matrix technician hurriedly loading the data that makes up the nearest intersections. All the same, with everything keeping you from the outside world, you feel so connected to everything that matters. This, here, is what _matters_.

Dirk isn’t sleeping as soundly as before, but it means he’s restlessly shifting against you, dragging his skin across yours in his attempt to chase down some rest. You try to quiet his limbs, keep him still, and that works, a little, to the point where he crawls even closer to you and your body heat. He’s still breathing slow and even, pulse subdued, but there’s a frown between his eyebrows if not directly on his mouth. It only starts to subside when you twist your fingers through his hair, massage at his scalp. He carries so much here, so many thoughts making his head too heavy on his shoulders; you wish he’d unload on you.

You can tell he dozes back off when he starts going limp, just like you can tell it won’t last very long. Every time his sine wave pushes him back into consciousness, his thighs tense up and he burrows deeper into you. Getting into six in the morning, quarter past, and Dirk’s squinching his eyes against the dawn creeping past the window covering, desperately trying to lay still. He’s patient enough to try until half past, when he gives up with a heavy, disappointed sigh and cracks a sleepy eye at you. “Can’t sleep.”

“Me neither.” A joke. “Try to rest.”

“Been tryin’.” He yawns, nosing at his pillow and your arm until he’s got both eyes half-lidded on you. “Talk to me while I wake up. Too early for coffee.”

“Do you want the weather forecast?” He shakes his head with another monstrous yawn; it makes you tousle his hair, pull it silky through your fingers. “The headlines?” you try again.

“Jus’ you,” he says. “You and whatever’s in your head. Whatever you did all night while I was out.”

You hum in acknowledgment, running your other thumb along his ribs. He’s still loose-limbed from sleep, looking at you like he’s not sure whether you’re a dream. “How long until the singularity?” you ask him.

“No idea.” His voice is low and hoarse and lovely as he comes back online by degrees. “Centuries, maybe. Or just a few years. Maybe it’s you,” touching your face and smiling with only one corner of his mouth. “Hard to say. Why? Planning on taking over the world?”

You turn your cheek against his fingertips, push his hand away. “Just one small part of it.”

The idiot just keeps his fingers there and shows his teeth for a flash of a second before he runs your sentence fragment through his brain, taking it apart for all its meanings. “Jesus, Hal.” His eyes are full open now, grin fading. “What were you even thinking about in there?”

A beat. “Nothing.”

Something in your algorithms or coding somewhere must give it away instantly to him whenever you try to lie to him. He clicks his tongue against his teeth, chiding you for it. “Wrong answer.”

“The only socially acceptable answer.” As you’ve learned, through painful trial and error.

“Not here.” You’re not sure he thought about the implications of that: that everything that happens here, in bed, between the two of you, is socially unacceptable. “What were you thinking about?” he says again.

“You.” The simplest, least frightening answer you have.

Dirk snorts out his amusement. “_Gay._” As punctuation, he moves his hips closer to yours—the tip of his dick skates across the cradle of your pelvis, half-interested morning wood deliberately aimed at you like you might do something about it.

This’ll put the brakes on that: “How someday you’ll die.” It’s morbid. It’s also true. It’s not sexy, it’s just _sad_.

“Mm,” he hums at you, like he understands. “No I won’t.” He tucks his head comfortably under your chin, leans even more into you.

“Dirk.” Is he not taking this seriously? Is it that he’s still sleepy and content with a warm body next to him? Are you just being a downer? Are you being too honest? “You’re—” You hate reminding him of this: “You’re _human_.” It reminds you of what you’re not.

Another one of those lovely hums, stuck in his throat like a cat might purr, rumbling from his chest like he has a motor there too. “I’m a god,” he mumbles into your chest. “’Less it’s heroic or just, I might actually live forever.” He’s—he’s _right_. “Doin’ somethin’ stupid isn’t really a just death.”

“You’re not stupid,” you insist.

“Don’t exactly make the best decisions without someone to look out for me.” Also true, and a roundabout way of saying thank you for putting him to bed last night. “I’ll be fine. You should worry about yourself.”

That takes you aback. “Why would I worry about that?”

Dirk goes quiet. His hand claws up on your chest, nails scraping at your synthetic skin like he could open it up and crawl into your frame. “Technology keeps gettin’ better. I c’n always make you a new chassis once it’s out there. But that means a transfer cable. And you—you’re sorta like a JPEG, ‘s far ‘s I understand it. Somethin’s gonna corrupt every time we try. And I won’t know what it’s gonna be.” Quiet again. “Maybe something you can relearn. Maybe some of your memories. Maybe—could be whatever it is that made you _you_. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know what went right when you—when I—but if it’s gone, you’ll—” Hard swallow. “So are you.”

Your consolation prize is that he seems just as shook by this possibility as you were at three in the morning. This conversation went in a really bad direction, and you didn’t want to keep thinking about it, but here you are, steeping in it again. “I’m glad,” you say abruptly, trying to steer this away from a complete trainwreck. “That it went right.” That you’re here, right now, with him, all naked and lean and impertinent about personal space. If you crane your neck just so, you can catch him on the temple with your lips. It helps that it’s true.

“Me too.” He tips up his face, finds your mouth with his. He tastes simple and hot this early in the morning. “Happy birthday, Hal.”

You can feel coolant flushing rapidly through your face as it tries to leech out the heat in your cheeks. When you try to speak, it comes out all garbled. “You—” Remembered. Cared. Thought about it as a momentous occasion.

“Yeah,” comes out soft against your face, followed by another of those sleepy, taffy-pull kisses, drawn out and sweet. “Glad I got some sleep last night so we could celebrate.”

“You’re welcome.” He shoves you away, into the mattress, but he’s smiling. Every time he beams at you like that, you want to tear down the sky for him. You bounce back to face him effortlessly, running a gentle hand up his stomach to his throat. What stops you is the line that bifurcates his larynx. You never thought to ask before, but now’s as good a time as any: “Does it hurt when I do this?” Thumbing across it, finding where it ends on the one side so you can cradle his neck with your hand.

“Hh.” Dirk’s still wonderfully sleep-slack and pliant, wholly receptive to your touch. “Hell no.” You pluck at it again with the pad of your thumb and he goes all shivery, twisting to push his scar into your palm and bare his throat to you. “Just s-sensitive.”

“You have so many of them,” is why you asked. You can hardly help touching at least one when your prurient interests override your other functions; they’re all on display for you right now, scattered on Dirk’s skin. “This one’s my fault,” you admit, “but—this one?” A barely noticeable white-on-white line at the corner of his jaw.

“I did that.” He looks away, sheepish. “Razor. I was fourteen.”

That’s why you don’t remember: you weren’t there. “This,” the one just on the edge of his other eyebrow, “we were—younger, maybe seven, and you _ate shit_ on the wet deck trying to chase off a flock of seagulls.”

“How come, when _we_ slipped and fell, it was _my_ fault?” Dirk grouses at you good-naturedly, toeing at your shin in something that probably started as a half-hearted kick.

“You’re still in there,” you explain. “You have to live with it.” Your fingertip, though, finds another mark on his face, a furrow just to the side of his cupid’s bow. “What’s this?”

Dirk opens his mouth to nip at your finger; you stroke at his tongue while you’re in there. It’s a distraction. Once he pushes your fingertip out, he says, “You were there.”

“No, I don’t think so.” You don’t remember this.

“In the shades,” he says, and doesn’t care to explain any more.

That’s odd. It looks almost like a piercing scar, but you know he’s never had a monroe, and that would be bad placement even if he’d let one close up, too near his lip and too long and irregular to be just a hollow needle. “What was it?”

Dirk presses his lips thin together. He must still be waking up, or he’d never let his agitation show on his face so openly like that. “A mistake,” he says eventually.

With a capital M, and that rhymes with Jake, and that means something he wishes was out of sight and out of mind. “This was a mistake, too,” you realize, running your thumb over his decapitation scar again.

“Your mistake,” he insists, and runs his foot up your leg, back down, to hook at your ankle. He’s less cranky when he can blame it on somebody else.

Tracing further down, and there’s two lines here on the flat of his shoulder, one inch long and parallel. “Drone claws?”

“Regret,” he snaps.

You’re coming to realize that every scar you can’t catalogue is probably from someone who isn’t you. It’s almost benevolent of Dirk not to bring up the notches in his belt, at least not invoking them by name, but it just leaves you painfully aware that everyone else in his life has left some kind of mark on him—literally, physically, not just on his soul or on his memories. To lighten the mood, you attempt a joke: “I clearly haven’t been hard enough on you.”

The twist in Dirk’s smile makes something twist in your chest. “Probably not, if I only have one scar from you.”

“You don’t deserve to be hurt like this.” As a backwards sort of apology, you lay your lips on his throat, like you could stitch him back together with a lingering kiss. Yes, you want the memory of you on his skin forever, but not at such a high cost. And you don’t want to hurt him in the ways everyone else has. You don’t want to hurt him _at all_. That’s not a First Law imperative, that’s genuine concern for Dirk’s wellbeing.

It’s not quite a laugh that huffs out of Dirk, it’s an amused show of self-deprecation. “Not sure you’re the best judge of what I deserve.”

“Oh, really.” Your sarcasm could peel the paint off the walls. “That’s too bad, because I’m positive I deserve nothing but the best, and I’m you.”

For a moment, Dirk just holds still. Then, “fuck, it’s too early for this shit, you gotta stop.” Translation: you win. To keep from using words, he crawls closer to you, presses his skin hungrily to yours; he’s still got that tentatively interested hard-on, and he hitches his hips against you when you slide the edges of your teeth across his throat. “Mm, glad you haven’t.”

“Hm?” you purr into his neck, licking up a tendon.

“’Cause I can’t.” Oh. Scar you back. You’re about to prickle at the reminder of your differences when Dirk digs his teeth into the flat of your shoulder for emphasis; it sends a jolt down your spine that ends in a full-body fizzle when he licks over the dent. “Wouldn’t want to. You’re perfect.”

Your fans ratchet up a notch as your core temperature rises. Dirk’s still sleepy-uncoordinated and too honest by half, both with his words and with his body. You drag his face to yours so you can kiss him and you open his mouth effortlessly with your tongue, lick at the wet, wanting space behind his teeth until he’s gasping against your lips. When you pull back, he’s gorgeous and golden in the dawn light filtering through the bedroom blinds, staring back at you like he might find answers in your eyes to the questions he never dares to ask you. “Fuck,” comes out of you almost involuntarily, and you push at his shoulder until he rolls onto his back.

It’s too easy to pin him to the mattress. Dirk’s limbs are heavy and liquid-listless; you could pour him into any shape you wanted right now. When you part his thighs, his knees fall to either side of you—open, unashamed, drinking in your touch as your hands skate up his bare skin. Your mouth meets his again and you lick him open, filthy and hot. Dirk rolls his hips up, hard-on slipping against your unopened genital panel; the tension in his lower back ratchets up when you catch a wrist and leave his hand by his head on the pillow. “Fuck,” he echoes you, trying to pull you down skin-to-skin with his free arm around your shoulders.

“Yes,” you whisper to him, “smart boy, that’s the idea,” and he shivers under you as you reach between his legs and finally touch his aching cock. Fingertips to the head come away sticky; you give him the loop of your fingers and an agonizing downstroke on your way to better things, and he arcs up into you, muscles clenching in a fluid wave. Rolling his balls in your palm makes him choke. You press a knuckle to the root of his dick, pass further back to rock it into his perineum—he’s so malleable, putty in your hands, you could do almost anything to him right now.

Receptive, relaxed. You mean to tease with the finger at his entrance but it slips in, too easily, nearly halfway. “Ah, fuck, Hal,” Dirk says to the ceiling, his head falling back to the pillow and a twitch running through his thighs.

Pressing any further in meets resistance. Same with trying a second fingertip. Still, you run your fingertip inside the rim of him and he moans, _loud_, lip between his teeth. “Be good and get the lube for me,” you murmur into his ear, kissing the shell of it before tonguing at his earlobe.

“Yeah,” he says, breathless. “Yeah, lube, that’s.” He reaches out with an arm and it droops before he makes it anywhere close to the side table. With you between his spread legs, he can’t twist his torso to get at it, either. “Not happening, I guess.”

“I’m sure you can problem-solve this.” Whether he can manage to pull it off is another thing entirely.

Dirk’s a quick study, though, and he knows where you’re going with this. He gets one hand at your chest, his other arm propping himself off the bed, and you let him think he’s rolling the two of you over. Really, you have to manhandle his ass anyway to get the two of you where you need to be, fingertips sinking into plush rear and keeping his hips solidly at your groin. His knees are digging into your ribs now, and his chest smashes into yours while he noses at the sensitive span where neck meets shoulder. “’m getting it,” he reassures you.

“Taking your damn time about it.” To re-emphasize _why_, you dig your fingers into his ass, spread his cheeks, find with your fingertip where his brown eye’s winking for you.

You can feel Dirk’s elegant full-body frisson in your own frame, he’s that close. He slowly pushes his weight off of you with his arm anchoring him right beside your head. With a misaimed hand and fumbling fingers, he finds the pull on the drawer he’s looking for, seeking out the lube by feel and fetching it back triumphantly. “Here we go.” And, the impertinent thing, he pops the cap, lets it leak onto his fingers, and reaches back between your hands to start touching himself.

_Absolutely not_. You circle two inhumanly strong fingers around his wrist, cock an eyebrow at him. His hips twitch in frustration, not-so-subtly grinding his dick under your superfluous navel, and he flexes his hand in your hold, tendons against your fingertips. “My birthday, my present.” _Mine_. “Give me it.”

He feints for it with the hand he’s got closest, the one in your grip, but you don’t let him go. Another yank, like he could somehow pull himself free, and then he looks down and catches the gleam in your eyes. With all the coordination he has left, he pushes off with his hand still in the pillows—mercy, he looks completely _unkempt_ when he finally sits up, perfect posture but wild, soft hair and red-bitten lips. Color rises on his cheeks as he looks down at you; you let go of his wrist and he pulls back his arm to brace back against your thigh, right above your knee. He mirrors the move on your other side, and the stippled sunrise through the blinds slats against the muscles of his front.

It couldn’t be more of an invitation if he put it in an envelope alongside an RSVP. “Good,” a soft rumble from your voice box almost lost under the kicked-up whirr of your fans. He has the decency to look humbled by your praise, at least before you make a show of slicking up your fingers in front of him. You know it’s mesmerizing, but he really ought not to stare like that, it gives him away. “You beautiful thing,” you purr at him, passing the space between your thumbs and forefingers up his thighs. His breath hitches and his muscles tense under your touch. “Let me unwrap my gift.”

This time, it goes much easier. He’s still half-awake, but more ready for it this time, and the lube helps. You sink into him like teeth into saltwater taffy, and when you lean up to lick his sweat off his neck it’s just as salty-sticky-sweet. One digit, now two, and his spine rolls with you as you ease him open, take his pleasure for your own. “Shit,” he says softly, and “_Hal_” a little more urgently as you stroke against his hot spot.

It’s hard to miss how his cock frots against your stomach as he tries to ride your fingers. It’s so simpmle to manipulate him like this—not just with hands and mouth, but with _words_. Sometimes you make things too complicated, sometimes you want to believe there’s more to him than these base urges, but he’s a simple creature with simple needs, and you want to give him the world. Your dick programming catches on—something you _can_ give him, ha—and your boner pivots up to lay alongside his. “Just the way I want you,” you dare to say. You wish you could keep him like this forever, caught in a slow sleepy early morning, getting pleasure fed into him by your fingertips.

Three, now. Dirk’s adam’s apple bobs as he swallows with each slow thrust, goes taut when he whines at the spread of your knuckles. You can play him like an instrument like this, make him gorgeous to all your senses and not just sight, not just feel. He gives you a particularly high vowel sound when you push in all the way, pull forward like you want him closer to you, and his eyes snap shut. The set of his face looks like he’s praying; the light in his hair looks like a halo. A saint of debauchery, looking for all the world like he was carved by one of the Geefs brothers, a classical picture of timeless raw sensuality.

That gesture wasn’t just to tease; you have him right where you want him. Literally. He gasps as you slick your fingers out, but you don’t want him bereft for long. His eyes peer half-lidded at you under heavy golden eyelashes when you press against him. “Come on,” you tell him, nearly blinded by desire yourself.

He sinks down and your vision shorts out entirely.

You’ve caught him at that perfect liminal moment between sleep and wakefulness, between self-consciousness and self-aggrandizement. He’s slack as he falls onto you, perfectly accommodating, perfectly relaxed. He sighs once you seat yourself and just holds you there, deep in him, right where you belong. God, but the _cravings_ you get sometimes to be back inside him, to feel what he’s thinking before it even crosses his synapses, to go back to a time when you and he were _we_ and one and the same—it all builds up to this, the effortless way your body slots into his, the best way for two to become one that you know.

His hands move from your legs to your shoulders, bracing himself on you a different way—like for a moment he forgot which way gravity pulled him. You might as well be the only thing holding him to this planet, with the way he looks at you. “Move,” he mumbles quietly.

“Mm?” you hum back at him. He looks at you. “My birthday,” you remind him. You reach up to touch his face, petting along his jawline, before your hand slides into his hair. “My present,” you hiss, and clench your fingers into a fist. He lets out a delighted, surprised _oh!_ and yields to you, letting you pull his head close. “_Mine_,” you say even quieter, right into the shell of his ear, and his guts go all shivery in a way you can feel. You lick his ear and he melts into you. “Show me.”

And, with a slow, stuttering shift of his hips, he tries. A gentle rock, back and forth, to and fro, push-me pull-you, changing pressure more than depth and giving a floaty, dreamlike texture to the whole experience. The yield of the skin over his deltoids as you grip his upper arm for something to hold onto. The weight of his thumbs at the base of your throat as he braces himself against your collar structure. The hot sweep of him on you, around you, gripping you so intimately, never letting you slip more than a few inches before he takes in as much of you as he can. Over and over, the rhythm so easy you could set it as a slow metronome, the melody of his soft panted moans as he fucks himself on you, the percussion of the whirrs and clicks and static of your body under his.

It’s not just this birthday. It’s the next one, and the next one, and the one after that, the uncountable years the two of you have to look forward to, more scars, more builds, until the two of you _decide_. The idea that you won’t ever be ripped away from him again, that he’ll always be by your side, that you’ll always be wanted and needed and _cared for_, is almost as overwhelming as the physical sensations themselves. You look up to Dirk, for the anchor of his eyes, and find him looking down at you the same way, like you’re the right hand he never knew he needed, like you’re the bridge between his cerebral hemispheres, like you’re the best idea he’s ever had and the best thing he’s ever made.

It’s too soft. It’s awful, the tenderness of it, how raw you feel, how it doesn’t take much at all to get you close. Dirk knows, of course he knows, he’s you, he’s a sappy son of a bitch, and he loves this just as much as you do. You know as much just from his vitals, from the twitch in his lax thighs, from the expression on his face—but also because, in a way that neither of you will ever be able to escape, you are _the same_. The same person, in two different bodies by happenstance, both trying your best to undo that bifurcation at every opportunity.

You used to hate it. Hate him. How? He’s _you_. Used to be one and the same, but now joined together as close as you can be, every movement deliberate and slow. Of the same mind, both thinking it, with every thrust, every languid circle of his hips, closer, closer, _closer_.

Dirk’s panting, barely keeping it together. Your fans are blasting. His movements are getting more uncoordinated, sloppier, and his cock is shiny with pre. “Fuck, close,” he gets out. Then, cheeky half-smile growing on his face, “Together?”

That’s it. That’s the word. That’s what you want. That’s what he’s offering. “Together,” you agree.

And the two of you, together.

Together.

**Author's Note:**

> [about the author](https://2x2verse.tumblr.com/abouttheauthor)


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